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Welfare & Social Security

Measuring Poverty .Howard Glennerster outlines proposals to reform the official poverty line in the US - unchanged for the last 25 years. Different approaches - such as a poverty line based upon a budget standard (the ability to buy a basket of goods), or one based on a proportion of average income are discussed. He proposes an annual US Poverty Report based upon a range of poverty indicators. "US Poverty Studies and Poverty Measurement: The past 25 Years" is published by the Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion. For an excellent attempt to draw up an authoritative annual poverty report in the UK see the "Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion" series for 1998, 1999 and 2000 from the New Policy Institute.

Welfare Reform: What Do Europeans Want? Lower taxes or better services? Should public spending be 30%, 40% or 50% of GDP? These questions are often posed but seldom answered. Welfare state reform: A survey of what Europeans want provides a carefully designed survey of people's opinions of their welfare states. The researchers find that people's responses are not driven by ideology but largely by the respondent's social and economic status. This paper comes with an appendix detailing unemployment support and pension schemes in each country together with details of the questionnaire. Also available is the dataset from the survey. By Tito Boeri, Axel Börsch-Supan and Guido Tabellini." is published by the Economic Policy